Brand Spanking New

Man's mind, stretched by a new idea,
never goes back to its original dimensions.
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

The original sense of brand is 'a burning piece of wood in or just taken from a fire'; other senses (e.g., 'a mark made by burning with a hot iron'; 'an identifying mark (of any sort)'; and 'a distinctive kind, class, etc.') all derive from this.

The expression brand-new literally means 'new as if fresh from the fire'. It is first found in the late sixteenth century. A semantically similar expression is fire-new, which is found in Shakespeare ("Your fire-new stamp of honor is scarce current"--Richard III) and elsewhere from the sixteenth century onwards.

The spelling bran-new is surprisingly common; it is recorded as early as 1715 in the works of the playwright John Gay and pops up frequently thereafter ("He adjusted his hat upon his head with as much care, real or pretended, as if it were a bran-new one of the most expensive quality"--Dickens, Nicholas Nickelby (1839); "We got an old tin lantern, and a butcher-knife without any handle, and a bran-new Barlow knife worth two bits in any store, and..."--Twain, Huckleberry Finn (1884)). It is, however, now generally regarded as an error. The spelling is a folk-etymology that arises from the pronunciation; the -d- in brand-new is not really pronounced, and the origin of brand isn't clear, so we see bran-new. A similar phenomenon leads to ice cream or ice tea: the -d in iced isn't pronounced and gets dropped.

Since someone is bound to ask about the phrase brand spanking new: This spanking, which is of uncertain though possibly Scandinavian origin, is a seventeenth-century word with such meanings as 'quick; vigorous'; 'unusually fine, large, striking, etc.'; and as an adverb 'exceptionally; strikingly'. There is also a much earlier (thirteenth-century) expression span-new (also, in combination with our phrase, brand-span-new), where this span is a word of Old Norse origin meaning 'a chip of wood'; span-new is now chiefly dialectal.

Thanks, Random House!

~ End Quote